scumbelievable

I Would Like to See It: Inland Empire

Were one to map film as a medium, Lynch’s Inland Empire might fall somewhere along the border between soap opera and found footage horror. Its shaky handheld camerawork and the raw, exposed visual quality of its digital footage makes it feel at times like a home movie shot by someone in the midst of a psychotic break, a narrative of the self and its fictionalization smashed to pieces and haphazardly reassembled into something equal parts alienating and uncomfortably intimate. Struc...

In the Flesh: Cats (2019)

I can only assume Tom Hooper saw the 2003 The Cat in the Hat adaptation with Mike Myers and thought, “I can go lower.” Why else would a grown man spend millions conjuring up a creative vision which manages the stupendous feat of being both bizarre and tedious, except for sheer perversity of character? Whatever Hooper’s reasons, his Cats is an exercise in boredom, a film the hour and forty-nine-minute runtime of which feels like living through the siege of Masada in rea...

I Would Like to See It: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh dices its main players into kaleidoscopic fragments, employing a visual style reminiscent of comic paneling to convey action, romance, and suspense through partial images. Its iconic shot of a razor in a black-gloved hand set against the shadows of an empty parking garage. Its cutaways to eyes going wide in horror, to a bloated corpse in the stagnant water of a bathtub, to a figure reflected in a pair of mirrored sunglasses create a v...

In the Flesh: Squid Game

Squid Game has a fascinating cinematic pedigree, evoking everything from SAW to Battle Royale to The Running Man as it spins its story of poverty, desperation, and dehumanizing cruelty. Anchored by the masterful performances of Lee Jung-jae, Anupam Tripathi, Park Hae-soo, HoYeon Jung, and O Yeong-su, the series roars out of the gate with some of the least sentimental depictions of the crushing daily anxiety of live in poverty to be found anywhere in the las...

In the Flesh: Barber Westchester

In her second feature film, animator Jonni Phillips creates a faintly Seussian alternate America in which an awkward and repressed young trans person — the titular Barber Westchester (Chris Kim) — struggles to come of age while dealing with cult conditioning, intense social, sexual, and religious anxiety, and the collapse of their own understanding of the world. It’s more whimsical than Phillips’ debut, The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, full of bloodthirsty parrots...

In the Flesh: The Matrix Resurrections

The act of having a cake and the act of eating said cake are, at an existential level, famously and fundamentally at odds. It’s a narrative dilemma which has plagued thirty years of blockbuster action franchises, saddling the entire enterprise with the overinflated tension of debating whether it’s going to be a safe retread or, at the risk of alienating viewers who want only what they’ve seen before recreated in a slightly different key, a departure. The Matrix Resurrections tr...

The Cuckoo, Chapter I: Two For Flinching

Manhattan, New York

1995

Shelby walked past Penn Station in the broiling August heat, hurrying so that no one would ask why she was crying. So that no one would look too close. She was sure her mothers had at least one PI sniffing around by now; they’d never go to the police, never do anything to risk their socialite friends finding out that their precious little baby boy, secured from the very best and most expensive orphanage in all of Korea, had run off to be some kind of tra...

Deadline Hell

Hey gang, I'm sure you've noticed I'm a few reviews behind with I Would Like to See It. I just wanted to touch base and let you all know I'm in the middle of a move as well as finishing my second novel, and to thank you for sticking with me through another crazy, draining year. You guys are the best readers anyone could ask for, and my plan is to get caught up in the next few weeks and -- barring unforeseen disaster, knock wood -- send out a holiday reward for all my backers.

Here's t...

In the Flesh: Spider Man 2 (2004)

While Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) hurled bags of gold bullion at Spider Man (Toby McGuire) after the latter, in his civilian life as Peter Parker, failed to help his elderly aunt May (Rosemary Harris) secure financial aid to help her pay her mortgage, I kept thinking of a quote from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace: “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Spider Man 2 is safe from any such accusations. Raimi’s second outing with the cash-strapped Qu...

In the Flesh: Spider Man (2002)

After two decades of Disney’s formulaic corporate superhero sludge, going back to the movie you could argue started it all is an almost surreal experience. Sam Raimi’s Spider Man bears little resemblance to the movies it inspired, its gee-whiz earnestness and enthusiastic embrace of its comic book origins via double exposure, split diopter, and other panel-reminiscent filming techniques a far cry from today’s studiously indifferent visual blandness. Even without the flattering ...

I Would Like to See It: Calvaire

On a primal gut level, there’s very little as upsetting as the sound of a pig in distress. Not only is the high-pitched squeal they produce simultaneously infantile and abrasive, confusing our brains as to how to react, but the animal’s lung capacity far exceeds our own, enabling them to maintain a squeal for an agonizing length of time. Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire has no shortage of terrible sights and sounds, but of all of them it was the pig’s suffering that most impressed ...

In the Flesh: Sorcerer

Every inch of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is made with such exquisite attention to detail that by the time the payload of unstable nitroglycerin around which the film’s plot revolves and from which it derives the lion’s share of its tension first appears, the consequences of its mishandling feel not just obvious but physically tangible. That the film’s first use of the explosive for a serious effects shot is not during an accident but as the climax of a back-breakingly protra...

Live Ammo

                                                                           PART I: CONDUCT

In basic they ...

In the Flesh: The Last Duel

The Last Duel opens with two knights at tilt, lances lowered, horses thundering over frozen earth. It’s a tense image, and Scott shoots it as though we’re riding hard on the heels of Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), clearly conveying the bone-shattering force with which the two riders are about to converge. The next time we see this same scene, over two hours later, that sense of tension and momentum has been transmuted into something truly nauseating. The life of de Carrouges’ ...

In the Flesh: House of Gucci

House of Gucci isn’t an especially memorable film. It’s not offensive, either. Far from it! The movie hits its marks, gets in its little jokes, and then puts itself politely out to pasture after serving its audience a wafer-thin portion of emotional payoff. Its characters are like paper cutouts in a puppet show, every action clearly telegraphed and legible, their inner lives completely absent from the screen. If it gave us something to look at in exchange for this impoverished ap...

In the Flesh: Arcane, Season 1

Arcane starts out like a hundred other shows aimed at older kids and teens. A plucky gang of orphans stumbles headfirst into a magical adventure. Old hands reminisce about the fights of their youths as fresh violence threatens. A hatchet-faced villain with a disfigured eye plots to unleash a dangerous drug on an already downtrodden undercity. Then one of the orphans kills most of her own family in a grisly accident, the old hands get wiped out, the villain’s plan pans out, and the ...

I Would Like to See It: Demonlover

You don’t see many erotic thrillers positioning the acquisition of a hentai animation studio and its affiliated websites as their central conflict. Demonlover not only does so, but makes it crackle with a thorny, uncomfortable sexual tension as we watch the brittle and sexually fixated Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen) try to maneuver her way through a web of industrial backstabbing and espionage. Her classically “frigid” manner conceals a woman teetering on the edge of sexual obl...

In the Flesh: Mad God

Shit pours down a funnel and into the mouth of a great ulcerous titan buried in the earth. It guzzles excrement without cease, processing ton after ton of filth through a bizarre system of organs naked to the outside world and then excreting it in turn through a biomechanical apparatus which reconstitutes waste into stick-figure golems of hair and refuse. The golems wander out into an industrial hellscape to rake more shit, fall into burning furnaces, get mowed down by floating slabs of metal...